novels I’m glad I read in 2025: a year in review

Welp. 2025, huh? It’s been … something.
 
But do you know what’s great? Contemporary genre fiction. I’m grateful and honored to have continued helping lots of wonderful writers this year, and also delighted to get to read for fun in a world where tenaciously joyful people write fiction even when things are (understatement) tough.
 
Here are 15 of the novels I really enjoyed this year—not published in 2025, that’s just when I happened to get around to them. I hope this list inspires you to further reading and joy, and I (always) welcome you to email me with authors and titles you think I should check out :)

contemporary romance

The Prospects, KT Hoffman (2024)
Eeeeeeeeeee! Maybe the best book I read this year. Trans, gay baseball romance with all sorts of friendship, community, struggle, family, hope, actual baseball details (usually not my thing but it works here), and neurodiversity. It’s so freaking sweet.
 
Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous, Mae Marvel (2024)
Friends to lovers celebrity romance between a megastar and a niche online celebrity (both queer women), lots of cat appreciation, mostly set in small-town Wisconsin. I am not generally a celebrity romance person, and yet this was a delight.

Imogen, Obviously, Becky Albertalli (2023)
A queer young adult romance starring a mysteriously very committed ally lol. A thoughtful engagement with gatekeeping, identity, belonging, moments of change and discovery on the brink of going-to-college, and what it's like to be truly seen.

historical romance

After the Wedding and The Devil Comes Courting, Courtney Milan (2018, 2021)
Courtney Milan’s Brothers Sinister novels were not the first romance novels I ever read, but they are absolutely the ones that grabbed me and brought me fully into the genre. (If you haven’t read that series, the first one is The Duchess War and they’re so good, go read all of them.) I wasn’t carried away by the first book in her Worth Saga series (Once Upon a Marquess), though, and kind of wandered off for a while. I’m so glad I circled back, because books two and three in the series really worked for me. A diverse cast of very compelling characters, well-wrought stories, great historicals all round.
 
A Shore Thing, Joanna Lowell (2024)
A frothy romance about art, botanizing, friendship, and rivalry in a Victorian seaside holiday town, with a long-distance cycling challenge (and also a bit of bicycle … jousting? I mean, why not?) and a trans main character.
 
We Could Be So Good and You Should Be So Lucky, Cat Sebastian (2023, 2024)
These are two of my favorite books of all time. We Could Be So Good employs soup as a romance device in a way that will never cease to melt my heart (I mean, among other things; it is not a book about soup), and You Should Be So Lucky is a gorgeous and deeply joyful book about grief and how we dare to let our lives and hearts get bigger anyway (also baseball and journalism and New York City). This year, I reread these one after the other in audiobook form (I started using libro.fm this year and am pretty into it), and … what a comfort, what good stories. The audiobooks do justice to the originals, which makes me real happy.

paranormal romance

Rules for Ghosting, Shelly Jay Shore (2024)
Another excellent queer grief book, this one with actual ghosts in. This beautifully, definitely Jewish novel is all about family both born and chosen, a wild range of intense human experiences from birth to death (the main character works as a full-spectrum doula as well as at his family’s funeral home), and the many things that can get between us and really feeling all of that. And it’s about love not despite or as an off-route from but blooming right within loss and pain and the whole mess of being a human.

speculative fiction (okay admittedly with romantic elements, but these are not romance novels per se)

In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan (2017)
A young adult fantasy novel with lots of snark, a thoughtful take on fairytales and monsters and the stories we tell about and to ourselves, and characters to love. It's really really funny and also much more than that.
 
Running Close to the Wind, Alexandra Rowland (2024)
Very queer, much pirates. As amazing fantasy/romance author Freya Marske put it, “Come for the irrepressible gremlin of a narrator, stay for the plot-relevant cake competitions!”
 
The Stars Too Fondly, Emily Hamilton (2024)
Starts with a group of friends stealing a space ship (fairly accidentally) and rockets off from there! We might say very queer, much space pirates, if pressed?
 
The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub (2023)
What if Lydia in Pride and Prejudice was acting so weird because she was A WITCH, huh? Ever think of that???

middle grade contemporary fiction

Framed! and City Spies, James Ponti (2016, 2021)
A young person in my life is so into James Ponti novels that I’m reading them now…and they’re great! City Spies is the first book in a series by the same name (seventh book to drop in February), with an ensemble found-family cast of talented kids who secretly work for MI6. Framed is the first of a trilogy focused on two nerdy best friends solving mysteries. As an adult, I love that these child characters have immense agency and real problems, and also the adults responsible for them are present, competent, and caring and actually see them as children, unlike in many a middle grade novel.

Happy reading!